It is the story of a few words, painted with a brush on the memory of some neighbors, that evoke streets that changed radically a few decades ago. And other graffiti, also attached to the retina, that help us remember times, not so foreign to today, when the car weighed heavily in the design of cities.
On the brick wall of an old low house that was about to disappear, between the streets of Pamplona and Francos Rodríguez, in Tetuán, a calligraphed declaration of love could be read in the early 90s: “My love, there are no words.” The phrase has become an essential element of the place and has been repainted on different occasions, as explained last Monday by user X Fernando Siles in a detailed thread that gives news of the inclusion of the case in his book. When the Eiffel Tower was red and cows were square. Marta Guijarro, a neighbor, writer and storyteller who grew up watching the graffiti disappear and appear, wrote online ten years ago that they even survived the demolition of the wall:
“Throughout high school, I grew up seeing how the phrase was ‘cleaned up,’ but it kept coming back. At the end of the COU, the wall was torn down because the houses that currently exist were going to be built on that land. And it was exciting to see that phrase, ‘My love, there are no words…’ reappeared on the metal fences that surrounded the work.
The graffiti, which undoubtedly remains in the retina of the most curious and rooted neighbors, was already mentioned a few years ago in a Paseo de Jane (neighborhood visits critical of the city and the community vocation). It was the neighbor Antonio Beltrán, who also participated in the conversation on social networks this week by providing a new photograph of the graffiti that, once again, stimulates our imagination. “What it seems, as we commented on Jane’s Walk through the neighborhood, is that years later the story did not end well: someone added the phrase with I ALREADY KNOW WHAT YOU ARE WORTH, in capital letters that hurt,” Beltrán explained in X’s thread.
It is no coincidence that Siles and Beltrán associate graffiti with the transformation of the street in Pamplona, opened onto the previous one by pushing a bulldozer through the old hamlet of the Estrecho neighborhood.
Arganzuela and Tetuán, bordering the central almond tree, underwent a profound development and transformation between the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 2000s. The transformation of the northern district had been proposed much earlier in a more radical way. The General Urban Plan of Madrid of 1963 practically proposed to wipe the slate clean with Tetuán and create a new district in line with the immediate extension of Castellana. Its guidelines would be specified in the Partial Plan of the Old Quarter of Tetuán, which, more than an urban plan, was a document of traffic organization. It sought to connect the M-30, the A Coruña motorway and the AZCA commercial area through the district, with large avenues that would cross the district, on the banks of which new blocks of buildings seemed to replace the existing ones. In 1978, the newspaper El País demanded a revision of the Partial Plan and headlined Tetuan’s urban plan involves the eviction of the neighborhood.
The material impossibility of an operation of such magnitude and the greater permeability of neighborhood claims after the arrival of the new democratic city halls have lowered the purpose of some proposals made with square and bevel, to the greater glory of road traffic and the construction industry. Despite this, many of the ideas of that time have been concretized over time through various projects, such as the construction of Avenida de Asturias or the renovation of Marqués de Viana Street.
The initial intention of connecting the area with General Perón and Castellana continued through the project of widening and extension of what was Pamplona Street, which in its new configuration absorbed the old Rodón Street. The exit to Bravo Murillo, initially planned in a more direct way, remained linked to the small Castilla Street due to the difficulty of orienting oneself in an area of very consolidated hamlets and adjacent to the main street that articulates the district.
However, the ghost of the road from the old plan continued to resurface in the neighborhood’s imagination and splash paint on the neighborhood’s walls. Beltrán remembers perfectly another very elaborate graffiti with a road strangled with fists and the legend “No to the Pamplona highway” that adorned a wall in the area at the beginning of the eighties. “Maybe from one of those first environmental groups or a neighborhood association,” he explains.
The new project envisaged the redevelopment of the area, with the direct expropriation of many residents by the municipality. The PERI of Avenida de Pamplona (although Pamplona is ultimately a street, all urban planning documents refer to an avenue) was launched in 1989 and was essentially located on the line drawn by the current road, but it affected the area of Castillejos, Juan de la Encina, Adrián Pulido, Fernando Osorio, Navarra, Castilla, Goiri and, of course, the disappeared Rodón Street. Almost 50,000 square meters and more than 130 families that were relocated, many of them outside the neighborhood (although two VPO buildings were also built). Following pressure from the neighborhood, the plan was reformulated in 2001 to include a square, the current one belonging to Poeta Leopoldo de Luis.
As always happens, the project lasted for years, throughout the 90s. Rodón remains the memory of the name of one of the new buildings and of a Facebook group of former students of the Rodón school (which was located at number 9 Otamendi Street).
This educational center, already closed and affected by the PERI, became a squatted social center at the end of 1992. During the nine months that the experiment lasted, conferences, screenings, a library, rehearsal rooms and meeting spaces were organized for organized groups, such as the Kolectivo Autónomo de Tetuán, a group of young people who participated in the 1990s in a squatting experiment that made Tetuán the central neighborhood of the movement.
The new and young neighbors wanted to participate in the life and demands of the neighborhood and set up an information campaign for the neighborhood on the urban projects in progress. They wrote a pamphlet that began as follows:
“Dear neighbors, dear neighbors: The City Hall is accelerating its urban planning for the neighborhood. These projects include the Pamplona Avenue project, the connection between Sor Ángela de la Cruz and Marqués de Viana and the Dehesa de la Villa Avenue project. “Roads that cross our houses, roads that cross our paths, roads that cross our parks, that cross our neighborhood, which is an obstacle to traffic in big cities.”
Pamplona has not become a highway or an avenue, but in its modest street name it has an unusual width capable of accommodating a central island and four lines of parking.
But life goes on and the paint stains. Today, at the confluence of Calle Pamplona and Calle Francos Rodríguez, there is a fenced-in area where, covered with other graffiti, the remains of strange characters who lived on that wall for more than a decade survive. Although it is unlikely that this was in the author’s mind, the pedestrian present and the inhabitant of the neighborhood could well identify them as souls of the past emerging from the concretions of the lots, emptied witnesses of the neighborhood that was.
Something similar happens at the corner of Calle Pamplona and Little Andés Pulido, where another old painting by writer Chusky, on a plot of land on the old Rodón Street, shows a motley collection of letters, colors and shapes in which the city’s buildings are consumed by flames. Perhaps future postcards in the retinas of today’s children; Who knows if the My love, there are no words of those who suffer the violent changes of this Tetouan.
